The rooftops of Copenhagen
by Paul

Comment:
Awesome! WTG, Paul!

Nightfall
by PenelopeK

Comment:
Yee Haw! You did it! MWAH!

Encroachment
by vawendy

Comment:
The precision of this is appealing, but in the end it takes me only 70% of the way to a 10... Still, a very nice shot. The lower edge, in and of itself, is quite striking.

Snowy Groyne
by JimiRose

Comment:
Wonderful image. The greenish blue would not be my choice, more steely would work better for me, but this is a nit. from me, an 8.

the line at which the sky and earth appear to meet
by timfythetoo

Comment:
And we count sheep whilst waiting for the fall. I count 7 of them. I give you a 7.

buoy
by bspurgeon

Comment:
Is the buoy named Waldo? Ah, there! I found it! Fabulous, ephemeral image.

To be a white bird
by whiteroom

Comment:
Not gloriously, but sadly, hanging on,
the White Ship trembles at the verge of dawn.
The Paper Albatross dips, and reveals
(in the White wings) a Whiteness that conceals.

'No way home against the wind!' taunts porpoise,
the while sharks nibble madly at the corpus
delicti, and some Whale-Judge from a Black sea
steams at the universe of poetry.

Words whirled, the White Words, vanish without trace.
Moray's a bailiff with a yawning face.
Anemone greets Hydra in the jury;
both bored, they stifle yawns — it's an old story,

Brueghel's Icarus uttering once again
(this time in verse) the solitude of pain.
The Judge, of course, has heard it all before;
he thinks, in fact, that poetry is a bore

And has no business standing at the bench.
He wanders. He dreams of some fluky wench,
and hears, at a great distance, his Brothers singing.
He is the Whale, and the White Ship winging

Its hapless course is surface-bound forever,
chaste in the wind — the wind that whispers 'Never!'
to all who plead the case of the raped poem,
the Word that, wounded, cannot find its home.

*************

It's a poem I wrote 20 years ago, and the image brings it back to my mind. Thanks for that. Lovely image. Bump to 9 from me.

Farmstead in Winter
by davidw

Comment:
This is just beautiful. I am particularly fond of the vignette on this one, although I suspect others may not be. I wish the mottled artifacts weren't in the upper part of the sky, but they aren't extremely obvious and I can live with them. Bumping.

The rooftops of Copenhagen
by Paul

Comment:
I keep coming back to this one. At first I was slightly put off by the blown-out sky area; I spent time obsessing over it, basically saying to myself "Gawd, I wish s/he'd taken the time to FIX that area, this would be perfect!" And that's not all, either; I started obsessing over how much it might be improved with the addition of a slight foreground gradient, because there's a sense of flatness about the scene that seemed a little off to me.

But now it's like the scales have fallen from my eyes, and I see more of the *immediacy* of the image, the very remarkable sense it has of being here-and-now, not heavily manipulated by the photographer's sense of drama. And even that, I suspect, is an illusion, because it HAS to have been manipulated, that's obvious.

So what's the bottom line? Either intentionally, or by happy accident, you are treading a very fine line right on the cusp of the "unreal", the over-dramatic; you know, the country I travel in all the time, where nothing is exactly as it was seen. And you've managed to convince me, at a visceral level, that this one IS "as it was seen", and I love it.

That plus the fact that it's utterly Mary Poppins all over the place. It's a wonderful image, and I'm bumping you 3 points to a 10 just on the basis that your image convinced me to write this rambling essay as I wait for the Patriots to kick off in an American football game.

Sunset
by Rodor

Comment:
I was ready to start voting just now, and I see, to my astonishment, that I have voted on ONE image, this one, and given it a 2. I assure you this was accidental, and I'm sorry. It's worth more than that and I'm bumping you now :-)